Concept list Wiktionary 2003 207

As far as it is possible to follow the editing history of the Wiktionary project, it seems that this concept list was first proposed in 2003. It was supposed to be a pure merger of the concepts which Swadesh proposed in 1952 and 1955. However, the editors did not notice (or deliberately ignored) that the former list explicitly lists the intransitive form of "to burn", while the latter lists "to burn" as transitive. Similar problems hold for "rain" which is explicitly labelled as a verb in the 200 item list, while no further specification is given in the 100 item list. One may of course say that these differences are minor ones, yet as a comparison with alternative approaches using the classical "Swadesh list" show, the incomplete descriptions of glosses have lead to a rather great degree of fuzziness in the application of concept lists for the purpose of language comparison.